In this book Mark Harrison rebuilds and analyses the Soviet economy's wartime statistical record, examining its prewar size and composition, and wartime changes in GNP, employment, the defence burden, and the role of foreign aid. Complementing classic long-run growth studies, the book compares the Soviet experience with that of other great powers. It emphasises the severity of current costs and capital losses arising from the war, which had a negative effect on GNP that persisted well after the end of the war. The results are based on a comprehensive analysis of hitherto closed official documents, shedding light on the dimensions of the Soviet war effort, the comparative economics of the war, and its long-term impact on the Soviet economy.

Post-apartheid South African elections have borne an unmistakable racial imprint: Africans vote for one set of parties, whites support a different set of parties, and with few exceptions, there is no crossover voting between groups. These voting tendencies have solidified the dominance of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) over South African politics and turned South African elections into 'racial censuses'. This book explores the political sources of these outcomes. It argues that although the beginnings of these patterns lie in South Africa's past, in the effects apartheid had on voters' beliefs about race and destiny and the reputations parties forged during this period, the endurance of the census reflects the ruling party's ability to use the powers of office to prevent the opposition from evolving away from its apartheid-era party label.

Under what conditions are some developing countries able to create stable democracies while others have slid into instability and authoritarianism? To address this classic question at the center of policy and academic debates, The Promise of Power investigates a striking puzzle: why, upon the 1947 Partition of British India, was India able to establish a stable democracy while Pakistan created an unstable autocracy? Drawing on interviews, colonial correspondence, and early government records to document the genesis of two of the twentieth century's most celebrated independence movements, Maya Tudor refutes the prevailing notion that a country's democratization prospects can be directly attributed to its levels of economic development or inequality. Instead, she demonstrates that the differential strengths of India's and Pakistan's independence movements directly account for their divergent democratization trajectories. She also establishes that these movements were initially constructed to pursue historically conditioned class interests. By illuminating the source of this enduring contrast, The Promise of Power offers a broad theory of democracy's origins that will interest scholars and students of comparative politics, democratization, state-building, and South Asian political history.

Taxes and Trust is the first book on taxes to focus on trust and the first work of social science to concentrate on how tax policy actually gets implemented on the ground in Poland, Russia and Ukraine. It highlights the nuances of the transitional Ukraine case and explains precisely how and why that 'borderland' country differs from the more ideal-types of coercive Russia and compliance-oriented Poland. Through nine bespoke taxpayer surveys, an unprecedented bureaucratic survey and more than fifteen years of qualitative research, the book emphasizes the building and accumulation of trust to transition from a coercive tax state to a compliant one. The context of the book will appeal to students and scholars of taxation worldwide and to those who study Russia and Eastern Europe.
The first book on taxation to focus on trust, allowing readers to see how trust can be put at the centre of policy implementation
Qualitative and quantative research provide readers with innovative and recent information on key components of post-Communist governance
Compares state bureaucracies in three different countries and shows readers what the precise ingredients are for building a capable state

As new federations take shape and old ones are revived around the world, a difficult challenge is to create incentives for fiscal discipline. A key question is whether a politically-motivated central government can credibly commit not to bail out subnational governments in times of crisis if it funds most of their expenditures. The center can commit when subnational governments retain significant tax autonomy, as in the United States. Or if the center dominates taxation, it can tightly regulate borrowing, as in many unitary systems. In a third group of countries including Brazil and Germany, the center can neither commit to a system of market-based discipline nor gain a monopoly over borrowing. By combining theory, quantitative analysis, and historical and contemporary case studies, this book explains why different countries have had dramatically different experiences with subnational fiscal discipline.

This book addresses the question of why governments sometimes follow the law and other times choose to evade the law. The traditional answer of jurists has been that laws have an autonomous causal efficacy: law rules when actions follow anterior norms; the relation between laws and actions is one of obedience, obligation, or compliance. Contrary to this conception, the authors defend a positive interpretation where the rule of law results from the strategic choices of relevant actors. Rule of law is just one possible outcome in which political actors process their conflicts using whatever resources they can muster: only when these actors seek to resolve their conflicts by recourse to la, does law rule. What distinguishes 'rule-of-law' as an institutional equilibrium from 'rule-by-law' is the distribution of power. The former emerges when no one group is strong enough to dominate the others and when the many use institutions to promote their interest.

Nationally-specific definitions of citizenship proved decisive for the development of the Tax State in Brazil and South Africa in the twentieth century. Although both countries had been divided along racial and regional lines in the late nineteenth century, watershed constitutions addressed these political problems in very different ways. South Africa's institutionalized white supremacy created a level of political solidarity that contributed to the development of a highly progressive and efficient tax system. In Brazil, federalism and official non-racialism proved more divisive, making the enactment and collection of progressive taxes much more difficult. The legacy of these divergent state-building processes remains evident at the beginning of the 21st century. Lieberman extends this analysis to a wider group of country cases and finds similar patterns and causal relationships between the politics of race, region, and taxation. The findings are based on field research, large-scale national surveys, macroeconomic data, and various archival sources.

The administrative state is a powerful tool because it can control the population and, in moments of crisis, help leaders put down popular threats to their rule. But a state does not act; bureaucrats work through the state to carry out a leader's demands. In turn, leaders attempt to use their authority over the state to manage bureaucrats in a way that induces bureaucratic behavior that furthers their policy and political goals. Focusing on Kenya since independence, Hassan weaves together micro-level personnel data, rich archival records, and interviews to show how the country's different leaders have strategically managed, and in effect weaponized, the public sector. This nuanced analysis shows how even states categorized as weak have proven capable of helping their leader stay in power. With engaging evidence and compelling theory, Regime Threats and State Solutions will interest political scientists and scholars studying authoritarian regimes, African politics, state bureaucracy, and political violence

Are interactions between soldiers, politicians, and civilians improving? Every nation has to come to grips with achieving a more enduring harmony between government, the armed forces, and society if it aspires to strengthen its democracy. While there is an abundance of studies on civil-military affairs, few examine all three of these actors, let alone establish any standards with which to assess whether progress is being made. This ambitious book devises a novel framework equipped with six dimensions, each of which opens a unique window into civil-military affairs, and which form a more integrated view of the subject. Those dimensions are accompanied by a set of benchmarks and metrics that assess progress and compare one country against another. The framework is applied to case studies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, with the conviction that insights could be gleaned that may be relevant elsewhere. Ultimately, by unpacking the civil-military relation into its various dimensions, this study has shed light on what it takes to transform what was once a politically-minded military into an organization dedicated to serving a democratic state and society.

In this ground breaking analysis, Terry Moe treats Hurricane Katrina as a natural experiment that offers a rare opportunity to learn about the role of power in the politics of institutional reform. When Katrina hit, it physically destroyed New Orleans' school buildings, but it also destroyed the vested-interest power that had protected the city's abysmal education system from major reform. With the constraints of power lifted, decision makers who had been incremental problem-solvers turned into revolutionaries, creating the most innovative school system in the entire country. The story of New Orleans' path from failure to revolution is fascinating, but, more importantly, it reveals the true role of power, whose full effects normally cannot be observed, because power has a 'second face' that is hidden and unobservable. Making use of Katrina's analytic leverage, Moe pulls back the curtain to show that this "second face" has profound consequences that stifle and undermine society's efforts to fix failing institutions.

Constitutions in authoritarian regimes are often denigrated as meaningless exercises in political theater. Yet the burgeoning literature on authoritarian regimes more broadly has produced a wealth of insights into particular institutions such as legislatures, courts and elections; into regime practices such as co-optation and repression; and into non-democratic sources of accountability. In this vein, this volume explores the form and function of constitutions in countries without the fully articulated institutions of limited government. The chapters utilize a wide range of methods and focus on a broad set of cases, representing many different types of authoritarian regimes. The book offers an exploration into the constitutions of authoritarian regimes, generating broader insights into the study of constitutions and their functions more generally.

Does it matter when politicians ignore the promises they made and the preferences of their constituents? If politicians want to be reelected or see their party reelected at the end of their term, why would they impose unpopular policies? Susan Stokes explores these questions by developing a model of policy switches and then testing it with statistical and qualitative data from Latin American elections over the past two decades. She concludes that politicians may change policies because unpopular policies are best for constituents and hence also will best serve their own political ambitions.

Why do vote-suppression efforts sometimes fail? Why does police repression of demonstrators sometimes turn localized protests into massive, national movements? How do politicians and activists manipulate people's emotions to get them involved? The authors of Why Bother? offer a new theory of why people take part in collective action in politics, and test it in the contexts of voting and protesting. They develop the idea that just as there are costs of participation in politics, there are also costs of abstention - intrinsic and psychological but no less real. That abstention can be psychically costly helps explain real-world patterns that are anomalies for existing theories, such as that sometimes increases in costs of participation are followed by more participation, not less. The book draws on a wealth of survey data, interviews, and experimental results from a range of countries, including the United States, Britain, Brazil, Sweden, and Turkey.

Social scientists have identified a need to move beyond the analysis of correlation among variables to the study of causal mechanisms that link them. Nicholas Weller and Jeb Barnes propose that a solution lies in 'pathway analysis', the use of case studies to explore the causal links between related variables. This book focuses on how the small-N component of multi-method research can meaningfully contribute and add value to the study of causal mechanisms. The authors present both an extended rationale for the unique role that case studies can play in causal mechanism research, and a detailed view of the types of knowledge that case studies should try to generate and how to leverage existing large-N data to guide the case selection process. The authors explain how to use their approach both to select cases and to provide context on previously studied cases.

Civil-Military Relations in Southeast Asia reviews the historical origins, contemporary patterns, and emerging changes in civil-military relations in Southeast Asia from colonial times until today. It analyzes what types of military organizations emerged in the late colonial period and the impact of colonial legacies and the Japanese occupation in World War II on the formation of national armies and their role in processes of achieving independence. It analyzes the long term trajectories and recent changes of professional, revolutionary, praetorian and neo-patrimonial civil-military relations in the region. Finally, it analyzes military roles in state- and nation-building; political domination; revolutions and regime transitions; and military entrepreneurship.

Asia after developmental state presents cutting-edge analyses of state-society transformation in Asia under globalisation. The volume incorporates a variety of political-economy- and public-policy-oriented positions, and collectively explores the uneven evolution of new public management and neoliberal agendas aimed at reordering state and society around market rationality. Taken together, the contributions explore the emergence of marketisation across Asia, including China, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam--what is now often described as the world's most economically dynamic region--and the degree to which marketisation has taken root, in what forms, and how this is impacting state, society and market relationships.

This book, first published in 2008, was a unique analysis of the struggle to build a rule of law in one of the world's most dynamic and vibrant nations - a socialist state that is seeking to build a market economy while struggling to pursue an ethos of social equality and opportunity. It addresses constitutional change, the assertion of constitutional claims by citizens, the formation of a strong civil society and non-profit sector, the emergence of economic law and the battles over who is benefited by the economic regulation, labor law and the protection of migrant and export labor, the rise of lawyers and public interest law, and other key topics. Alongside other countries, comparisons are made to parallel developments in another transforming socialist state, the People's Republic of China.

The history of Vietnam prior to the nineteenth century is rarely examined in any detail. In this groundbreaking work, K. W. Taylor takes up this challenge, addressing a wide array of topics from the earliest times to the present day - including language, literature, religion, and warfare - and themes - including Sino-Vietnamese relations, the interactions of the peoples of different regions within the country, and the various forms of government adopted by the Vietnamese throughout their history. A History of the Vietnamese is based on primary source materials, combining a comprehensive narrative with an analysis which endeavours to see the Vietnamese past through the eyes of those who lived it. Taylor questions long-standing stereotypes and clichés about Vietnam, drawing attention to sharp discontinuities in the Vietnamese past. Fluently written and accessible to all readers, this highly original contribution to the study of Southeast Asia is a landmark text for all students and scholars of Vietnam.